Over a pier, the first beacon inflamed --The vanguard of other sea-rangers;The mariner cried and bared his head;He sailed with death beside and aheadIn seas, packed with furious dangers.

By our doors Great Victory stays ...But how we'll glory her advent?Let women lift higher the children! They blessedWith life mid a thousand thousands deaths --Thus will be the dearest answered.- Anna Akhmatova

Yet poetry is mute, crushed under the blows of history. We stand in awe. Tunisians, Egyptians, and clearly the peoples of the Arab world are redrawing in theory and in political practice the global map of civil space. They usher and raise questions about human dignity, intellectual engagement and political and civil resistance that are universal in scope and challenge if not altogether overwrite standing theories of social structure and humanities scholarship. As the edifice of the state flounders, with inexplicable, actually absent, nationalist or sectarian mythologies civil society steps in with spontaneous ingenuity and unimaginable creativity.

One cannot but bow to the Tunisian women who offer food and water to demonstrators, and in an astonishing gesture of generosity, extend sustenance to army officers- a kindness that embraces what is essentially threatening. Egyptians salute and are saluted by soldiers, objectifying tanks and artilleries, instruments of power, in the service of their advance against tyranny.

It is folly to punctuate in time and space where and when this revolutionary march began. It began everywhere and stretches far back, but it took a momentous turn on the streets of Tunis and Sidi Bouzid and now is being honed in Suez, Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Egypt. Moreover, we know in our guts, that it will swerve, twist and turn in Yemen, Baghdad, Bahrain, Amman, Morocco, Algiers until it is perfected in Palestine.

The fight is hard and pitilessThe fight is epic, as they say.I fell. Another takes my place -Why single out a name?After the firing squad - the worms.Thus does the single logic go.But in the storm we'll be with you,My people, for we loved you so. - Nikola Vapcarov

What is remarkable in the second decade of the 21st century is how archaic, almost medieval, the stratagems of power, imperial rule and their colonial agents are. What happened in the Abu Ghraib of Iraq also happened as the Tunisian revolution was unfolding in the Mahdia prison, north of Sfax, where eighty people perished when their mattresses were lit on fire. Not surprising that seventy political prisoners were shot dead in cold blood in Abu Zaabal prison in Egypt as protests went on.

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:a mixture of blood and body, a penetratingpetal that brings nausea.Between the coconut palms the graves are fullof ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.The delicate dictator is talkingwith top hats, gold braid, and collars.The tiny palace gleams like a watchand the rapid laughs with gloves oncross the corridors at timesand join the dead voicesand the blue mouths freshly buried.The weeping cannot be seen, like a plantwhose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,whose large blind leaves grow even without light.Hatred has grown scale on scale,blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,with a snout full of ooze and silence - Pablo Neruda

As opposed to this gruesome inhumanity, we witnessed Tunisian and Egyptian civil society creating a culture that attended to aesthetics of appearance. Men and women were collecting garbage, grooming the streets, managing traffic; people’s committees were founded to own the functions of the state, and create human shields to nurse monuments, memory and history. "You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming." Pablo Neruda

In solidarity with this spirit, Alwan opens its space for a day of communal participation, cultural artistic expression and fundraising on behalf of the families of those who have fallen. We know that they are many, and whatever we can offer cannot compensate for the loss of loved ones.

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!For mighty were the auxiliars which then stoodUpon our side, we who were strong in love!Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,In which the meagre, stale, forbidding waysOf custom, law, and statute, took at onceThe attraction of a country in romance!When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,When most intent on making of herselfA prime Enchantress--to assist the work,Which then was going forward in her name!Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,The beauty wore of promise, that which sets(As at some moment might not be unfeltAmong the bowers of paradise itself)The budding rose above the rose full blown.What temper at the prospect did not wakeTo happiness unthought of? The inertWere roused, and lively natures rapt away!They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,The playfellows of fancy, who had madeAll powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strengthTheir ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirredAmong the grandest objects of the sense,And dealt with whatsoever they found thereAs if they had within some lurking rightTo wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,Had watched all gentle motions, and to theseHad fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,And in the region of their peaceful selves;--Now was it that both found, the meek and loftyDid both find, helpers to their heart's desire,And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;Were called upon to exercise their skill,Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!But in the very world, which is the worldOf all of us,--the place where in the endWe find our happiness, or not at all! - William Wordsworth